Emotional Dynamics of Populism and Its Non-Populist Alternatives: Discussing the Role of Compassion and Pride

Abstract

The paper discusses populist appeals to emotions in political communication, considering their role in the proliferation of political polarisation and radicalisation. Revisiting the Emotional Rescue Model of anger, enthusiasm, and fear, we considered pride and compassion low-arousal alternatives to populist storytelling. In the experiments, we tested how participants (n=364) respond to appeals to pride and compassion in their brain activity, emotional expressions, prosocial behaviour, attitude change, and memorisation. In the paper, we primarily discussed the results of the fMRI (neuroimaging) study and compared them with the previous studies on authentic pride, compassion, empathy, and reappraisal. Considering similarities in the activation of the superior and middle temporal gyri, temporal pole, inferior frontal gyrus, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, we argue that compassionate political narratives should be the most effective low-arousal alternative to populist storytelling. Moreover, stimulation of the reappraisal-related network in that group suggests that participants reframed emotional negativity into prosocial acts of caring and helping, also re-evaluating their attitudes.